THE ORIGIN OF MAORI CARVING

Te Ao Hou, July 1958, Page 30

THE ORIGIN OF MAORI CARVING by SIR APIRANA NGATA PART 2 This essay was written about the time of the building of the Waltara Meeting House (1936). In the first instalment which appeared in Issue 22, Sir Apirana assumed two basic styles of Maori carving, one of them typical of the Arawa and East Coast tribes, and the other typical of Northland and Taranaki. He set out to prove that these two styles have a common ancestor and believed that the Ngati Awa, living between Whakatane and Opotiki in the 14th-15th century, made carvings which were later copied by Maori artists all over the country. Maori tradition reveals that the pre-European Northern and Western carving had a ngati Awa origin and that the Arawa carving style can be traced to Ngati Awa. East Coast carving is also shown, in an interesting ancient chant, to come from the Bay of Plenty. However, great differences existed between the style borrowed by the Northern and Western tribes around 1500, and the known Ngati Awa style of the 18th century, which influenced the Eastern carvers.